For any large website, managing traffic globally is critical to the architecture for both disaster recovery and load balancing. Here comes the Azure Traffic Manager, a geo load balancer and durability solution for your cloud solutions.

With it you can prop up large, redundant, durable, distributed applications in seconds that would rival the infrastructure of the largest websites.

The first step is to click the Virtual Network menu item.

The goal of the next step is to define what Azure deployments we’d like add to our policy, what type of load balancing we’ll use, and finally a DNS entry that we’ll use as a CNAME. We can route traffic for performance (best response time based on where user is located), failover (traffic sent to primary and only to secondary/tertiary if primary is offline), and round robin (traffic is equally distributed). In all cases, the traffic manager monitors endpoints and will not send traffic to endpoints that are offline.

That’s it, now we have our app available on *.trafficmanager.net and all we have to do is to point our domain record cname to it. Simple… definatelly

About the author

Rok Bermež is Slovenian Windows Azure MVP, he works as a Software Engineer and Microsoft Certified Trainer at Kompas Xnet. His primary interests include cloud computing and web development. With extensive experience in development and architecture he participated in many projects and since the CTP release of Windows Azure much of those projects are based on Windows Azure platform. Rok has been delivering courses, writing code and speaking at conferences and community events on Microsoft technologies for the last couple of years. You can also find him on Twitter (@Rok_B).